Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Abstract

This forum is occasioned by the publication of Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity, a provocative work of philosophy from a scholar whose intellectual efforts emerge from the intersections of race, religion, and politics. Lloyd develops the concept of Black dignity by placing the active struggle against domination at the center of his inquiry, specifically the struggle against anti-Blackness as a defining feature of life in the United States. This philosophical treatise will be of interest to scholars of rhetoric for the variety of reasons outlined in the reviews that follow.There is a dynamic of mutual exchange at work in these pages: scholars of rhetoric elucidate what our field can learn from a philosophical approach to the study of Black dignity and struggle, and they also show how these philosophical insights can be usefully extended. Karma R. Chávez attends to the material and sonic situation of her reading experience, addresses how Lloyd frames the question of domination and struggle, and invokes the work of the rhetoric scholar Josue David Cisneros. Coretta M. Pittman begins with a meditative approach that lingers on Lloyd’s conception of the ontic and the ontological. She then considers the ongoing work of struggle as the site of dignity, positing the convergence of Lloyd’s philosophical investigations and of rhetorical studies in the work of renewal—in finding fresh starts and inventing new paths. Tamika L. Carey closes this forum with advice about how to use fighting words, that is, how to use language in the cause of Black dignity: with precision, intentionality, wisdom, perspective, and a collaborative respect for different techniques of struggle. Positioning her line of thinking within a scholarly constellation shaped by Black feminist, womanist, and Black queer activist thought, she focuses on Lloyd’s conception of Black rage and its connections with rhetorical impatience.Together, these reviews take Lloyd’s work as a jumping-off point for thinking about the role rhetoric plays in the struggle that is Black dignity.T J Geiger IITexas Tech UniversityI settle into writing this while listening to blkbok’s Black Book. blkbok is a hip-hop artist and neoclassical pianist whose first album dropped in June 2021. While his name is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, his album is an homage to the Academy Award–winning film Green Book, about the Black pianist Don Shirley’s 1962 tour of the Deep South. The film’s title refers to The Negro Motorist Green-Book, a Jim Crow–era guide (first published in 1936) for Black road-trippers that let them know of friendly places to stop for gas, food, lodging, and the like. The Green Book was an attempt to ensure Black dignity; it was a small but meaningful tool in the struggle against anti-Blackness and domination. It was designed to enable Black folks’ unfettered mobility, whether for leisure or for work. blkbok’s music resonates with this effort. The fit and tattooed Black male artist’s music defies expectations, opens up new possibilities for Black living, and generates conversations. For example, the Black Book track “George Floyd and the Struggle for Equality” is as ragefully passionate as it is devastatingly haunting, and, while only one track among several, it is a reminder, as if one needed reminding, that the struggle is ongoing and that there are many ways to participate in it. Further, as Vincent Lloyd insists, through the many iterations of the struggle for Black lives, dignity is both named and found.Black Dignity is a remarkable work of philosophy. It is written from the vantage point of the radical Black tradition, but Lloyd intervenes in that tradition, often gently identifying its shortcomings and recentering it in Black feminisms. This turn is inherent and overt in his work as he theorizes from within the contours of contemporary Black political movements, the contemporary iteration of which is decidedly Black feminist and queer. Lloyd identifies Black dignity as “the broader philosophical project implicit” in those movements (6). He says simply: “[D]ignity means struggle against domination” (8). Here, he is careful to differentiate between dignity as some achievable status and dignity as “performance, activity” (9). Particularly, he is interested in collective activity. He also cautions his readers to be careful of the seduction of the ontic, the real and object oriented. Instead, he contends that “only ontological struggle, struggle aimed at domination, struggle against the master,” promises true freedom (10).Some contemporary theorizing about Black struggle deploys several catchwords designed to describe the predicament of Black people in the United States, and these words may include oppression, marginalization, suffering, and exploitation. Lloyd convincingly argues that these all miss the mark as they keep us from engaging in the primal relationship of domination, the relationship between master and slave. “Domination is defined by a capacity to act rather than by specific acts,” acts that may result in oppression, marginalization, suffering, or exploitation (10). In other words, when we begin with thinking about domination, we are able to reside in the realm of the ontological, the site of true freedom. Centering attention on the particular results of domination locates us in the ontic, and, from that standpoint, we can never understand the conditions that enable and sustain domination in their wholeness. It is worth noting—perhaps especially for some readers who might think primarily through and with vectors of power that are not Black—that Lloyd does not center Blackness because of some allergy to multiculturalism or from a refusal to accept that other kinds of domination matter. Blackness must be central because it is domination’s “chief paradigm” and, thereby, the best lens through which to understand domination and, more importantly, resist it (27).In laying out his case for the framework of Black dignity, Lloyd asks his readers to accept a difficult truth if we are to believe in what he is offering: “[T]he object of ontological struggle is, by definition, impossible to achieve.” Yet he is not on the side of pessimists, Afro- or otherwise. He goes on: “In the process of struggle, freedom can be dreamed, and such dreams call into question the absolute control of the master—motivating more struggle” (11).I rehearse Lloyd’s central thesis at length because I am persuaded by it, and I want readers of this journal—particularly those who, like me, have invested their lives in the study and practice of struggle—to be persuaded by it, too. His clarity about the conditions we face is born from decades of struggle against and study of domination. And, more than any book I have read recently, his offers us a lens through which to confront the conditions we face. He supplies for us a template for engaging in struggle, an invitation to participate in Black dignity, regardless of the identities we may, ourselves, possess.For scholars of rhetoric, Lloyd’s work resonates with that of Josue David Cisneros, who argues that the study of rhetoric “should be governed by a commitment to such an abolitionist telos” (2021, 95). Like Cisneros, Lloyd is indebted to abolitionist frameworks for his understanding of what the struggle against domination entails. While many reformers dismiss abolitionism as utopian, without a telos centered on the end of domination, reform will only strengthen the conditions of domination. Moreover, Lloyd notes an important role for those who study rhetoric in the project of Black dignity. He writes that philosophy and rhetoric take on a joint task “to narrate connections between primal scenes of domination and domination manifesting in the world”: “This requires telling stories in worldly terms, using words and images that will move readers to join the struggle. Domination tells its own stories that conceal and naturalize it. The task of the philosopher-rhetorician is to out-narrate domination” (163). Readers of this journal might cringe at the reduction of rhetoric to narrative, at the implication that philosophers do the work of thinking, and the fact that rhetoric is presented here as narrative practice. This might be especially hard to swallow given rhetoric’s vexed relationship with philosophy, often positioned as its mere handmaiden.However, if we read Lloyd alongside Cisneros, we can see that the role for scholars of rhetoric is more substantive. If a commitment to an abolitionist telos requires attending to the bordering practices at every stage of the work—from how we understand our object of study to who does and does not inform our thinking—then placing Black dignity at the center of our thinking provides the best possible lens for interpreting such practices. In other words, whatever the form of the intellectual labor, it is incumbent on us to make our scholarly practice part of the struggle against domination. It is necessary that we keep central the primal scene of domination, that we attend to the way in which the rhetorical practices that we perform and those that we critique are struggling against or participating in domination. From here, we begin to participate in the end of the world; we are part of the project of Black dignity.Karma R. ChávezUniversity of Texas at AustinVincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity sets out to examine the ways in which the Black Lives Matter movement’s founders, members, and youth activists reimagine Black dignity in the twenty-first century. Lloyd is quick to point out, however, that the struggle for Black dignity has long been a focal point for Black activists looking to help Black people gain control over their bodies and minds. From Frederick Douglass’s fight with Edward Covey to Martin Luther King Jr.’s active participation in the Montgomery bus boycott, the struggle for liberation and the fight against domination is, Lloyd suggests, Black dignity.Black dignity is an outgrowth of the struggle against domination, yet struggle must also yield other noteworthy ends. In short, Lloyd proposes that there are different kinds of struggles and different ends to be achieved from struggle. The ontic struggle yields a kind of quasi freedom, and the ontological struggle yields full freedom. Ontic struggle, according to Lloyd, means that one struggles against domination to acquire a specific object. The struggle to obtain the object could be the completion of a personal goal. To struggle ontically means that one’s struggle to obtain the specific object is determined by what those in power name as a valuable object. Simply put, Lloyd says: “Each object in our world, where our perception and action are shaped by interlocking systems of domination, is constituted by those regimes of domination” (10). In an ontic struggle, then, Black people’s struggle for liberation is directed by visible and invisible systems of domination, and that struggle may be successful but only insofar as one’s gains are momentary. In other words, Black people can struggle and sometimes win against a materialist domination that leaves them mired in quests for objects that result in personal gratification but not full freedom.Ontological struggle, on the other hand, is a struggle against “domination” itself (10). Lloyd describes the ontological struggle as one focused directly on challenging the oppressive conditions that keep one in bondage. He refers here to the master/slave relationship, which has contemporary corollaries. The slave struggles “against the master” not to acquire the master’s material goods but to demand full freedom (10). The freed person in an ontological struggle both in the past and contemporaneously recognizes that freedom is both an expressive and a physical condition and that the outcome of both is Black dignity.While Lloyd recognizes that the struggle for freedom as both an ontic exercise and an ontological exercise is Black dignity, he is quick to note that an ontological struggle against systems of domination is nearly “impossible to achieve” (11). Returning to the master/slave paradigm as the framework within which to understand how domination functions, he argues that, once the enslaved person dismantles one system of domination, another one replaces it. From enslaved person to emancipated person to quasi citizen to citizen, the systems of domination are arranged in such a way that the “symbols are impermanent” (12). This does not mean, however, that struggle against domination should not persist. The ontological struggle must be constant, particularly for the full liberation of Black people. Lloyd notes, however, that there are so many other forms of domination, including but not limited to “colonial, . . . patriarch[al], and capitali[st]” (14), but points out that anti-Black racism is by far the most acute form of domination and that it is also part of “interlocking systems of oppression” (14–15).How Black people access and acquire Black dignity in the face of domination is complicated by Lloyd’s belief that full freedom from domination is not completely obtainable, but there are theoretical and practical ways to work toward the aims of the ontological struggle. Black philosophy is one such way, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s founders and members provide the language to challenge ongoing systems of domination. Put succinctly: “They articulate a philosophy, a set of ideas about how the world is. This philosophy flows from the claim to Black dignity” (22). To be fair, there are, according to Lloyd, Black American predecessors who have been radical activists calling for the full liberation of Black people, such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks (there are also others unnamed in his book). Nonetheless, in a world where respectability politics is no longer the preeminent philosophy and strategy for contemporary young people and young adult movement leaders, particularly those in the Black Lives Matter movement, their movement strategies are, Lloyd suggests, constitutive rather than reductive. The opening up of the space for difference and an embrace of otherness missing in respectability politics leads Lloyd to argue that the Black philosophy that emerges from the Black Lives Matter platform is a way out of the master narrative and into multiplicity and Black dignity.If one imagines Lloyd’s Black Dignity as a twelve-inch ruler, the kind that secondary school teachers require for the purposes of math work and craft projects, then one might imagine his book as two halves of that twelve-inch ruler. The two halves proffer two kinds of reflection. The first half of the ruler, the theoretical half, explains how the struggle for true liberation in the face of domination is Black dignity. This, in turn, transforms into a philosophy of Black dignity. The second half of the ruler, that is, the second half of the book, outlines the specific structure of Black dignity as a philosophy that is outlined as follows: “Black rage, Black love, Black family, Black futures, Black magic” (21). There, the ontological struggle for full freedom is outlined in a series of chapters that explain how Black philosophy is theorized and practiced. For my purposes here, I focus on the first half of the ruler to propose why Lloyd’s book could prove helpful to rhetoric scholars interested in building on his work and/or supporting established claims that anti-Black racism continues to have real impacts in the lives of American citizens.Although Lloyd acknowledges that there are several kinds of domination at play globally (14), he argues passionately that anti-Blackness is the “preeminent mode of domination” and that “the preeminent struggle is the Black struggle” (32). The last three years—which have included a global pandemic, the high-profile murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor at the hands of White male vigilantes and White policemen, the summer of racial reckoning, and the ongoing anti-Blackness backlash as one result of the summer of racial reckoning—need continuing intellectual exploration from scholars invested in exposing rhetorics of hate, violence, and rage while also examining rhetorics of dignity, love, futures, and joy.If one is to believe that American democracy is currently teetering on the edge of oblivion, then Lloyd’s ideas about the philosophy of Black dignity remind all that domination is an ongoing enterprise and that the struggle against domination must also be ongoing. This means that scholarly efforts should consistently investigate language use suggesting that a danger point is not really dangerous but merely an inconvenience and show how such language use is indeed dangerous after all. Lloyd recognizes the danger of such obfuscating language use. At one point he suggests: “We come to recognize the ruses of domination, how it makes the bad appear good and the ugly appear beautiful” (31). This was one of Plato’s warnings about rhetoric in the Gorgias. The sophists would teach their students to manipulate language for personal gain, thereby helping them achieve an advantage over and above the good of the people. The counterpoint to Plato’s critique of rhetoric in modern times is the idea of renewal. Scholars of rhetoric have a chance actively to participate in acts of renewal, and Lloyd’s book offers both prescriptive and descriptive ways for scholarly work to build on his theoretical and practical road maps.Lloyd encourages everyone—but particularly Black public intellectuals—to reflect on what they do in their lives as writers and thinkers, on what renewal strategies they might use to get beyond the mundane in their scholarship, and to be true advocates and activists fighting against domination. Scholars have access to resources, particularly human resources—community activists, students, and each other. He suggests directly that scholarship needs to be conducted with the struggle for full freedom in mind and not so much focused on personal outcomes. He knows this is risky business but maintains: “With struggle comes a kind of flourishing that we can never achieve simply by inhabiting a culture well” (155). In the midst of that struggle is Black dignity and the chance for full freedom.Coretta M. PittmanBaylor UniversityThe lay terminologies I use to explain rhetoric to the folk I encounter in my everyday life probably seem rough by academic standards. In no way devoid of intellectual sophistication, these words and phrases simply rely on a form of Black cultural wisdom that is, at best, intuitive and perhaps even passed down among us through the generations. At the base of this pool of wisdom is our shared assumption that our words have weight. Our languages and voices matter. We can spin our words with sophistication, beauty, and joy. When need arises, we can contour our words to build community or to wield as weapons for battle. Our assumption reveals an adherence to the belief that both death and life reside in the “power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21). To have the quality of life we deserve, we will have to fight.What can operate to counter this intuitive cultural system is a demand for authenticity and clarity among female Black intellectuals and womanists at the level of language. The charge is to practice, decipher, and require ethical communication. It is a traceable legacy. In the late nineteenth century, Ida B. Wells’s writing ethic mandated that she and others call lynching “by its true name” (Royster 1995). The processes of “coming to voice” or “speaking truth to power” that Patricia Hill Collins (1998, 2012) and others have deemed necessary to resisting oppression carry an expectation of praxis. When the time comes, you must speak boldly and truthfully, particularly in the face of threat. These standards are not only for times of conflict. I can still hear my late grandmother’s admonishment, “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.” But today it sounds more like a lesson about the importance of integrity regardless of my circumstance. To fight with words requires precision.Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity rests precisely in the spaces between intuition and inheritance and precision and praxis. The project emerges from his observation of a shift in political vocabulary among young Black people, many of whom were frontline protestors against the last decade’s resurgence of anti-Black violence. Although Lloyd acknowledges that “[c]ulture provides language, concepts, and repertoires for action, feeling, and thought,” he also recognizes the possibility for individual difference. Our “ontological registers” motivate how we struggle against domination because they can dictate an individual’s motives or “reasons for action in struggle and the feelings elicited by struggle” (171). Since ontological registers are capable of transmitting anti-Black sentiments, Lloyd’s project is to bring oppressive systematic structures, their operation, and how Black Americans understand their relationship to them into clearer resolution. In doing so, his book unpacks how we can understand Black liberation and struggle at a time when our collective conversations about this work are subject to discursive slippage. Through a method that combines deep listening with contextualization and theorizing, Lloyd outlines the dimensions of embodied and performed antidomination work, or Black dignity, culled from the “activist rhetoric” of contemporary movement leaders, the writings of their intellectual foremothers and forefathers, and what he describes as the “crisper, connected concepts” undergirding the philosophy behind these efforts (xii). To fight well is to fight intentionally.The chapter “Black Rage” is a productive example of the kind of conceptual and discursive accuracy toward which Lloyd’s philosophical inquiry pushes us. Following contemporary Black studies scholars, Lloyd identifies the end of multiculturalism’s supposedly peaceful reign and the beginning of contemporary understandings of Black rage as the February 2012 night when George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin. With the subsequent murder of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer and the corresponding protests, the assumption that Black Americans were angry was not precise enough. The truth was that these murders activated a latent rage that can be made manifest when the collective soul is wounded (40). Lloyd devotes the remainder of the chapter to linking rage to the performance of Black dignity, essentially untethering it from frameworks that strip it from its natural human impulses and from justice campaigns that suppress it in favor of respectable displays of self- and group control. In so doing, he positions it among the resources that Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Darnell Moore, and other Black feminists and queer author-activists have wielded to fight domination. With his analysis, he corroborates the claim that “Black rage can build movements” and that Black women have historically been best suited to “discern rage oriented to truth from rage oriented to lies” (54). To fight with wisdom requires perspective.The number of scholars who are likely to see in Lloyd’s argument about ontological registers a resemblance to the assumption that individuals’ ideological orientations directly influence their sense of political consciousness assures me that the claims about rage and discernment he cites will be taken up enthusiastically by rhetoricians. The question that remains for me, however, regards the space between Black rage and rhetorical impatience, which I have defined as “performances of frustration or dismissal and time-based arguments that reflect or pursue haste for the purpose of discipline . . . [and] foreground the assumption that equity and justice for one’s self, Black women, and Black communities is already overdue and, thus, requires speed and decisive action” (Carey 2020, 271). Lloyd does not take up the question of timing that places rhetorical impatience into conversation with scholarship on kairos or the temporal turn in rhetorical studies (Houdek and Phillips 2020). Nor does he acknowledge how “temporal hegemony” pushes “equity and justice further and further out of reach” as I do (Carey 2020, 273). But he illustrates how making accommodations for the future is a mandate of Black rage also. He does not cite Moya Bailey’s concept of misogynoir as the condition of anti-Black misogyny (Bailey 2021) that can precipitate Black women’s rhetorical impatience as I do, but he acknowledges the potency of righteous indignation within these struggles as I have. Whereas I position righteous indignation as a temporary posture that the activist Bree Newsome voiced to show her insistence on the treatment she should receive and the life she must have, Lloyd positions indignation as the outcome of an indignity, a state of being cast off and treated as less than human. Rhetorical impatience transitions the indignant and fatigued from inaction into agency. Black rage transforms the indignant and angry into the dignified. While I have argued that impatience is part of a “self-care” project among Black women, the untethering project that Lloyd’s book invites is necessary at this moment. Impatience is percussive, everyday disruptions invoked on demand. Black rage is an inherent orientation that can be modeled for future generations and, thus, passed down as a legacy. The scale and scope of these concepts are different. To fight collaboratively is to register respect for a technique that can issue a stronger blow.I cannot predict yet whether Lloyd’s book will be cited in one of those periodic reflections on the state of rhetorical studies such as the Octalog, but I believe that it should be. Black Dignity does not purport to teach us how to engage in freedom or liberation work at the level of language, but, with its probing analysis of contemporary social justice discourses, it brings still undervoiced truths to research on social histories of rhetoric.Tamika L. CareyUniversity of Virginia